Jeff Makes Software

I noticed a string of posts today about breaking out ObjectSpaces from Whidbey (I happened to see Paul Wilson's first). That's an interesting development.

I was thinking last night about all of the new declarative controls in ASP.NET v2. Things like the data source I find fascinating, because they require even less code to deal with. Putting aside the debates about the “right” way to separate your application layers, I think these are great for John Q. Programmer Jr.

There was an interesting little piece on MSN today about taking time off to do, well, whatever. I can't tell you how long I've wanted to do that, on my own terms. Now that I've been laid-off a number of times, not working isn't nearly as scary as it used to be.

What the heck, I'll jump in. Reading from Keith Warren and Frans Bouma, I think the two go to extremes in describing what they see as the issues surrounding the Microsoft and EU case. The reality is probably somewhere more in the middle.

Craig Andera blogged about leaving GotDotNet, presumably its workspace feature, for SourceForge. The ASP.NET forum team also moved out of there recently. I'm surprised it took that long.

A couple of weeks ago I was rambling about code-behind and Whidbey. The reason for the rambling was that I was starting to think about how I'd build the next version of POP Forums.

I'm at that point in my book where I need to write about delegates. While I do “get” delegates, it's really hard for me to put into words what they are. Every example I've seen in other books does a poor job of it, in part because the descriptions are so abstract that you end up scratching your head and wondering why you'd ever ever need one.

I've thought a lot about the culture and experience of the .NET community at large lately. Between the book I'm trying to write, the site I'm trying to maintain (about time to write something new for it!) and the communities I try to be active in (Sitepoint, as well as my own), obviously I think about such things quite a bit. Consider also a number of blog entries about who Microsoft should target with their tools, and the resulting elitist discussions.